London in 2009: Slimline Boris Johnson promises things can only get better

On the 31st of December 1665, Samuel Pepys wrote: 'Certainly this year of 1666 will be a great year of action, but what the consequences of it will be God Knows.' The famous London diarist was not the only one looking grimly into the future; in the same year William Lily was predicting the Great Fire, which arrived on September 2, and was even imprisoned for his prognostication. It seems that all the soothsayers have a field day when the future looks bleak – it is so much easier to predict an impending catastrophe than it is 'a rosy fingered' dawn.

Boris Johnson has pledged to shed a stone while saving London

So it is with glee that Boris has returned to office pledging, firstly to lose a stone from his girth, as well as saving London in the interim. Before leaving us at Christmas he urged us to shop for Britain; today, in an article featured in the Evening Standard, he offers us the silver lining we have all been waiting for. In fact he is so positive about the future that if you added a drum machine and a backing track, his tune would sound a bit like 'Things Can Only Get Better'.

However, he makes a more serious point: 'Recession or not, this will be remembered as a new Victorian Age.' Now, this all sounds wonderful but which Victorian Age in particular was he alluding to?

Any allusion to the past raises alarm bells. The choice of detail always says far more about the speaker or what he is speaking about than the allusion itself. Boris is not the kind of politician, one imagines, who plays with Victorian imagery lightly.

His image of London is not the well-oiled and efficient industrial machine. This, after all, was an age that turned railway stations into cathedrals. The greatest improvement to Victorian London was the reworking of the sewerage system. I do not think Boris is would want to be remembered for that.

No, the mayor has got his 19th century back to front. Boris is an Augustan, that forgotten wedge of history stuck between the French Revolution and Victoria's coronation in 1837. It was an age of energy and contradictions; in the words of Ben Wilson's recent history, it was the age of Cant, of decency and disorder; and Boris should celebrate these paradoxes within the city, and himself.

This was the city built by John Nash out of the economic quagmire of the Napoleonic wars – a real economic crisis that stagnated the whole nation. Nash carved out Regent's Street from the slums of Soho, and created a new image of what London could be. Sir John Soane did the same, redesigning the outside of the Bank of England. This was the capital of flashy brilliance, mercurial wit, and undisguised ambition.

If Boris stands by what he said on 23 December, it is this vision of London of the 1810s that Boris should be aiming at rather than the 1860s. I think it would certainly make the city a more fun place to be.